Syndrome - Thomas Hoover (best summer books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Thomas Hoover
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The room she entered had a row of beds, each shrouded in a curtain. As she walked down the center aisle, she realized that only one of the beds was occupied.
And, yes, it was Kristen. She was lying there and when Ally slid back the curtain, her eyes clicked open, startled.
“Hi, don’t be afraid. I’m a friend.” She quietly finished drawing the curtain aside.
Now the once-breezy Kristen Starr was staring at her with angry eyes, the false bravado of a frightened child. And she looked much younger than she had in the head shot she’d attached to the walls of her town house with steak knives. She said nothing for a moment; then she mouthed, “Who are you?”
“I talked to you on the phone a couple of days ago,” Ally said, not sure herself exactly when it was, “when you went down to your place on West Eleventh Street.”
“I don’t know you,” she mouthed again, this time with a slight whisper.
“My name is Ally Hampton.” She moved next to her so she could keep her voice down. “I’m an interior designer. I once did an apartment for you in Chelsea.”
“I’m about to go on a journey,” she whispered. “I don’t remember you, but maybe you’re the one who’s going with me.
There was something otherworldly and chilling about her voice.
“What journey do you—”
“We were going to go away. That’s what he promised. Just us two. Well, I’m ready. I want to go out and play. But he doesn’t care anymore. He just wants me to disappear. So that’s what I’ll do. Only we’ll do it together, you and me.” She reached up from her bed and ran a finger across Ally’s face. “Will you take me out of here? He promised me everything, that I could get it all back. But now I know he didn’t care. He was just using me.” She stopped, then gave a cruel laugh from the back of her throat. “But now it’s going to happen to him too. I can tell. That’s why he doesn’t want to see me anymore. He doesn’t want to see what’s in store for him.”
What has happened? Ally wondered. It sounds like some kind of bizarre experiment gone wrong.
“Won’t you come with me?” Kristen went on. “We’ll go to a place nobody has ever been to before. It’ll be just us.”
Her seductive eyes, at once plaintive and demanding, would have lured anyone toward wherever she wanted to go. For a careless moment Ally found herself wanting to follow them.
No, this is madness.
Or, Ally thought with horror, is she seeing something in me that I can’t see?
“Kristen, listen to me. Please. I think it’s very possible I’ve just had a stem cell procedure. For my heart. I don’t know if it’s like what you had, but I want to know what happened to you.”
“Don’t do it,” she mumbled, seeming to come back to a kind of reality. “Just get out of here now. After… it starts, he gives you shots and things, but nothing works.”
Ally felt her consciousness start to wobble. She reached out and seized the edge of the bed for support.
“Kristen, talk to me.”
Her eyes went blank again, and Ally could just barely make out what she mumbled next. In fact, all she could catch were random words, words that only drifted through her consciousness and failed to stick or make any sense. It was as though Kristen were in a stance and sleepwalking among the words of some alien language.
“Young,” Kristen seemed to say. “You want to be… to stay. Old is so horrible. Time. You’re young and then suddenly you’re old and it turns out you can’t…”
Ally heard the words, but they didn’t make any sense.
“I’m sorry, Kristen. I’m feeling a little dizzy.”
“It’s started,” she said, abruptly coherent again and focusing in on Ally. “That’s how it began with me. At first they said everything was okay and then it wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s happening throughout my body.” She sobbed. “I’ve stopped having periods and I’m getting acne. Everything is… changing.”
The words drifted through space, and Ally felt like she was hallucinating, in a place where time was sliding sideways. The images were all retro, things from her past that floated through her vision in reverse chronological order.
That was it. In her mind, time was going backwards. But was it just in her mind? She looked again at Kristen and gasped. Finally, finally she understood the horror of what was really happening….
Oh my God.
“I got here as soon as I could after they called me,” came a voice from the doorway. She turned and saw Karl Van de Vliet, together with the nurse Marion. “You really shouldn’t be down here. I don’t know who gave you a card. But we’ve brought a wheelchair. You really should be resting.”
Marion rolled the chair through the door and expertly plucked the card from the reader.
“Now, please sit down,” she said. “We all just want to be on the safe side, don’t we? I’ll need to give you a sedative.”
Ally looked at Van de Vliet, wanting to strangle him.
“No, you’re not giving me a damned sedative. I don’t want to be on the ‘safe side.’ I want the truth. And I want it now.”
Thursday, April 9
11:16 P.M.
“Let’s go into the lab to talk,” Van de Vliet said. “I’m very sorry I wasn’t here when you came out of sedation. But Marion called me at home, as I’d told her to do, and I came in as quickly as I could. I’ve got a place on the lake, just down the road, so I’m never far away.”
He was rolling her through the air lock door, Marion behind them. Then they took the elevator up. She was furious that Kristen was being left behind like an abandoned casualty of war.
Ally also was reminding herself about her appointment with Grant to get the hell out. But her mind was having trouble holding a lot of thoughts at once.
He pushed her wheelchair into the section of the laboratory where a line of computer terminals was stationed. After he’d fluffed a pillow behind her head and turned off some of the glaring fluorescents, he began.
“Alexa, this is a delicate time for you. We need to get you upstairs as quickly as possible and feed you some broth and put you back to bed. However, I want very much to give you an update on the status of your treatment. The headline is, it’s going very well. We fused some of the telomerase enzyme with your existing stem cells and your response was immediate. In fact, it appears the new heart tissue has reached critical mass and has already begun replicating itself. We’ve learned to expect the unexpected around here, but your response has significantly exceeded our simulations.”
He turned to Marion and asked her to go up and make sure Alexa’s bedding had been changed. “We’ll be up in a second. And please make sure that bowl of broth is ready and waiting.”
After she departed through the air lock, he walked over to a lab bench and checked the numbers that were scrolling on a CRT screen.
“All right,” Ally said “talk to me. I just saw Kristen. I’m still not sure if I believe what I think is happening, but I want the real story and I want it now.”
“That’s part of what I need to discuss with you.” He glanced away for a long moment, a pained expression on his face, seeming to collect his thoughts. Finally he turned back. “You see, the clinical trials have demonstrated that we can use the telomerase enzyme to ‘immortalize’ a patient’s own stem cells and then rejuvenate their brain or liver or even their heart. So the next question that’s hanging out there in space is obvious. What would happen if we could find a way to generalize the enzyme and disperse it throughout someone’s entire body, not restricting it to just one organ? And not just rejuvenate-regenerate.”
This question had actually passed fleetingly through her consciousness, though not fully articulated. It had taken the form of wondering where the use of these “immortal” cells could eventually lead.
“The trick would be to have just enough enzyme in your bloodstream to replace senescent cells as they are about to the, but not so much that healthy cells are replaced.” He paused searching for a metaphor. “If we thought of the process of cell senescence as something inexorable and steady, like a treadmill, then what we want to do is run just fast enough to stay in one place.”
“This whole thing does sound like Alice in Wonderland.”
“Yes, well… if we could do that, then it’s possible, just possible, that one’s entire body would simply begin regenerating itself instead of aging. Not just your skin. All of you. That’s the theory behind what we’ve called the Beta procedure.”
“But is that something you ethically ought to be doing?” she said, feeling a sense of dismay, of playing God. “Isn’t that going too far?”
“Frankly, I’m beginning to agree with you, but there are others who ask, how far is too far? Half the medicines we now have are intended to trick the body’s responses somehow-or to meddle in some other way, turning off stop-and- go signals at the cellular level. For example, some birth control pills make your body think you’re already pregnant. They trick our natural mechanisms. That kind of thing is commonplace in medicine today. But our research is poised for the next level, to answer the question of how long we can actually live. So here’s the argument. There’s no reason the human life span has to be what it is. In some unhealthy nations the average citizen doesn’t even reach sixty. Whereas in others, like the United States and Japan, the mean is already well past three score and ten. So what is right? What is reasonable? A hundred? Two hundred? It’s entirely possible to believe we could live productive lives at least twice as long as we do now.”
“And you think we should do this? The world would be thrown into chaos.”
“But look at the incredible cure rate we’ve already effected here using the telomerase enzyme. When our clinical trials for the NIH are announced, it will be the medical equivalent of the shot heard round the world. Nothing we know will ever be the same again.”
“That’s where you should leave it. To go further is obscene.”
“I fear recent events may have proved you right. Against my better judgment, I went ahead and experimented with the Beta procedure. And the results thus far have turned out to be disastrous.”
“I guess you’re referring to Kristen.”
“One day I casually mentioned the Beta to Winston Bartlett and without telling me, he brought it up with Kristen. She insisted on trying it.” His expression grew increasingly pained. “I want you to know I was against it. I warned her that it was highly experimental, that I could not guarantee what the side effects might be, but she begged me to do it anyway. Then Bartlett essentially ordered me to do it.”
“So what happened?”
He grimaced. “I got the dosage wrong. That’s my best guess. After I performed the Beta on Kristen, the enzyme was stable in her for over two months and appeared to be having an effect. All signs of aging abruptly stopped. It gave me a false sense of confidence. Also, there were no side effects. That was when Bartlett wanted to try it too. So I went ahead with him. But then, to my
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